U.S. ISPs sign up for “six strike” policy on piracy

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The battle between entertainment businesses and Internetpirates has been a long one. We’ve heard countless stories of companies going after someone who illegally downloaded a movie and then were made to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for it. Now, Internet service providers such as AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Cablevision, and Time Warner Cable are stepping in to protect their customers’s privacy while weeding out piracy by implementing a new “six strike” policy.

The major ISPs have signed a voluntary agreement with the movie and music businesses to work on the issue of copyright infringement. The new policy will protect subscriber privacy and will ensure that the ISPs won’t be filtering or monitoring any of their own networks for infringement. They’re leaving that up to groups like the Copyright Group or the RIAA to do the lurking among peer-to-peer file sharing networks. The plan will work very similar to hows it does now where the copyright holder will send a message to the ISP if they see your IP address dipping its toes into some illegal downloading.

The ISP will then pass along the message to the accused user. It won’t provide any information to the copyright holder, like the name or address of the alleged users, without a court order. The new plan aims more to educate than to punish. ISPs don’t want to lose a customer altogether – that’s good money being lost – so a new six-strike alert system has been put into place.

The series of “copyright alert” messages warn users in various ways that their alleged activity has been discovered. The first alert will be sent by the ISP in an email and will inform the user that their account may have been used for content theft. Oh, and also that it’s illegal. The message will inform the user that consequences could result. Aiming to educate, it will direct the user to resources that will help them check their computer’s security and the security of their WiFi network. It will also provide resources to places where they can find legal music, movies, and TV shows. The second alert, if the activity continues, will be similar to the first.

The third alert is where things get a little more interesting. This alert will feature something like a click-through pop-up notification, or a landing page that will block you from moving on unless you verify you’ve read the page. This is to ensure that the user has seen the message. Some of us get hundreds of emails a day, and the first two messages could easily go unseen. The fourth alert is similar to the previous one.

Things get a little more punitive at the fifth alert. The ISP may take one of a couple of measures referred to as “Mitigation Measures.” These may include a noticeable reduction in the speed of your Internet connection, another landing page that won’t go away until the subscriber contacts the ISP, or educational information about copyright infringement that you’ll have to read and respond to. The sixth alert will be similar to the fifth.

This whole strategy seems like a pretty reasonable one, and if you’re still getting caught after six times, it’s more than fair for copyright holders to come after you with legal action at that point, unless they have got it completely wrong, that is. However, if you do reach the fifth and sixth alert, it’s still possible to appeal the “mitigation measure.” There’s a $35 filing fee to appeal, but for people who have been wrongly accused, like the guy who was accused of downloading child pornography, this process may come in handy.

What do you think? Is this a fair system to be put into place by the ISPs?

Speak Your Mind

Sleepininca

So our isps have become nazis. That’s f**ing great. Thank God for spoofing. F**k the riaa!

Anonymous

You do not gain customers by threatening them. The MPAA figured this out about 30 years ago. VHS movies used to cost $40-160 each, people figured out how to buy blank tape, and dub copies from rental movies, or record HBO/Showtime.

Then the MPAA figured things out and dropped new VHS movie prices to $8-20 and the birth of the home video library sprang into existence. It was simply easier and more cost effective to buy the movie, rather than maintain 2 tape units and stockpile blank tape.

Te RIAA is producing FEWER new album releases than they did 30 years ago, less choice all competing for the same disposable dollar, that now has more competition than 30 years ago. For $20 I can buy a DVD, a CD, put it towards a XBox/ps3/Wii game, iTunes games, movies and songs, or subscription based games. Competition that simply didn’t exist 30 years ago.

Yet, the RIAA is still trying to maintain a business model from the 1970’s. Adapt, or die.

Anonymous

I think it’s fair, in the RIAA’s own right, but to be fair, if they weren’t such stuck up greedy assholes people wouldn’t bother pirating anyway…

Fabion Burke

This is a terrible idea. If I lived in america I would be deeply upset to be potentially receiving advertising for movie and music services in my inbox, and I would be changing to a minor ISP.

Fabion Burke

This is a terrible idea. If I lived in america I would be deeply upset to be potentially receiving advertising for movie and music services in my inbox, and I would be changing to a minor ISP.

Long story short: The MAFIAA decided that this will somehow bring them more litigation dollars and fear, presumably because they don’t want lawyers wasting their time on single or double-infringement cases and because this illusion of quasi-fairness gives people that end up litigated after six strikes a more egregious image.

Other than litigation and fear (which the MAFIAA has been more concerned about than customers for a very long time), I’m sure the criteria for ISPs screwing their customers over will be lower than ever. Getting sent back to the 56k days following a stream of notices that require you to spend your own time and money convincing the people you’re paying for internet service that your $50/mo entitles you to full service is a ridiculous idea. It would even be a ridiculous idea if it were facilitated by the courts.

These people don’t do fair, and they certainly don’t come anywhere close to “more than fair.” They praise child porn for promoting net censorship to politicians and abuse a position of privelege to harass and litigate a public that has been trained not to understand the fundamental distinctions between their house and a publisher’s copy restriction and trademark holdings.

Long story short: The MAFIAA decided that this will somehow bring them more litigation dollars and fear, presumably because they don’t want lawyers wasting their time on single or double-infringement cases and because this illusion of quasi-fairness gives people that end up litigated after six strikes a more egregious image.

Other than litigation and fear (which the MAFIAA has been more concerned about than customers for a very long time), I’m sure the criteria for ISPs screwing their customers over will be lower than ever. Getting sent back to the 56k days following a stream of notices that require you to spend your own time and money convincing the people you’re paying for internet service that your $50/mo entitles you to full service is a ridiculous idea. It would even be a ridiculous idea if it were facilitated by the courts.

These people don’t do fair, and they certainly don’t come anywhere close to “more than fair.” They praise child porn for promoting net censorship to politicians and abuse a position of privelege to harass and litigate a public that has been trained not to understand the fundamental distinctions between their house and a publisher’s copy restriction and trademark holdings.